This new dev watercooler blog covers casual content for 85s. As we've covered in recent posts, there's a ton of content to do even if you don't raid with Firelands coming out: dailies, epic questlines, new achievements and zones. Blizzard has created great quest hubs and events that tie into the current plotlines before--Isle of Quel'Danas, the war efforts for Ahn'Qiraj, the Argent Tournament dailies to name a few--and now we get to read a dev's perspective on Firelands.

As this is my first dev watercooler, I thought some introductions would be in order. I'm the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, but many of you may already be familiar with my writing and webcomics under the pen-name "Fargo" from years past. To all my new and old friends: Hello! I hope to have the opportunity for more chats like this in between cramming our game full of epic experiences capable of melting your frontal lobes with pure liquefied awesome. (It says that on my business card.)

I'm 85. Now What?

World of Warcraft has a pretty big footprint: we try to create a world that appeals to casual and hardcore players alike. There's a whole body of players -- be they casual or solo gamers or serious gamers with time constraints -- who gravitate toward questing. It's the most accessible part of the game. Quests move you through cool locations, allow you to play through epic stories, and continually reward you without requiring a lot of practice or commitment. Not everyone has the time to raid, and not everyone wants to; for many players, quests are the whole game. A major thrust of the Cataclysm expansion, obviously, was to recreate much of the world to give players a more consistent, satisfying, epic questing experience as they level up.

But there's a problem with level-up questing, and it keeps me up at night. It has an end. When you hit max level, the rewards slow to a trickle. You don't get a comforting Ding! every couple of hours. You stop learning new abilities. From a solo progression standpoint, your character is in many ways “done,” and you turn your attention to the other parts of the game (like crafting.)

For many players, the end is just the beginning. We've done a lot to provide serious players with ongoing progression in the form of dungeons, raids, and accumulating high-end gear for fighting bosses or PvP. But what about the player who just wants to keep questing?

Keeping the Rewards Coming

In the absence of gaining levels, there are still ways to reward players who want to continue questing or playing through quest-like experiences. Here are some things (there may be more) that might encourage players like this to stick around:

Participation in an epic story

A sense of progress

Discovery of something new or unexpected each day

Earning character customization (including cool mounts!)

Earning fun toys

Making your character more powerful

I didn't list gold as a reward, because even though it's fun to hoard gold, the usual reason you want to do so is for one of the reasons listed above. I also hesitated to add “making your character more powerful” to the list. Even though it's fun and rewarding, I think it has a limit. It's mostly relevant only if you've got powerful stuff to fight. And if you're not interested in raids, getting powerful just for the sake of power isn't always compelling.

We've grappled with this problem before, and we'll continue to tinker with solutions. The Isle of Quel'Danas provided people with a great sense of progression, at least on a realm-wide level, and it sure felt epic. The Argent Tournament definitely gave players a sense of personal progress, as well as lots of fun toys.

But for patch 4.2, we really wanted to give players something. Something big!

Fight for the Firelands!

The Guardians of Hyjal are getting smart in patch 4.2. They're not just assaulting the Firelands with hardcore raiding guilds… they're attacking that place with everything they've got. That includes you, solo players! We've created a whole zone dedicated to daily questing. There are some 60 new quests in total -- that's about half a zone's worth of quest content. While the raiders are concentrating on taking down the likes of Ragnaros, you'll be securing the rest of his fiery domain.

There's also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses -- over the course of weeks -- across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves. Along the way, major characters are going to get rocked, you'll meet (and destroy) a few new villains, and you'll earn yourself a small heap of nice rewards. The druids are establishing a beachhead in a hostile world, starting with little more than a pile of rocks and ultimately erecting an enormous otherworldly base.

The progression is personal: you won’t see it happen until you make it happen.

We want to keep that sense of progression going, not just over the course of weeks but on a daily basis. As you begin to unlock and upgrade your hub in the Firelands, more quests will become available, and you’ll be able to slowly push your way forward every day. Extensive randomization means your quest flow will be a little different one day to the next. You’ll also have choices to make as to how the battle progresses.

The Firelands daily area hits a lot of the high points on my list above. And, for good measure, players can also earn a lot of gold and player-power enhancing items as well.

Beyond the Firelands...

Problem solved? Far from it -- to be clear, we don’t think the Firelands questing arc is "the answer." But I'll come out and say I think it's pretty sweet. I'd love to hear your feedback -- it's been up and running on the Public Test Realm for a couple of weeks now. Personally, I've fought my way into the Firelands and I'm nearly ready to select my first major upgrade to the quest hub… do I go with the Druids of the Talon or do I recruit the Shadow Wardens? Decisions, decisions! My choice will impact the next couple weeks of questing.

Still, we're building towards something, and we're constantly watching players to see what works and what doesn't. I can't wait to see the Guardians of Hyjal stage their assault on the live servers.

In the meantime, even as we speak, our Top Men and Women (and I want you to imagine that we're wearing lab coats) are scheming up ways to push these ideas even farther in future World of Warcraft updates. Players shouldn't feel like max level is the end of their experience. We want everyone to participate in something epic, no matter what their playstyle.

Dave "Fargo" Kosak is the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft. Each morning by the first light of dawn his forearms are ritually shaved, followed by twenty minutes of cardio on one of those playground spring-horses.

Ghostcrawler's back after a hiatus from posting his developer blogs and this time he wants to talk talent trees. A lot of us aren't a big fan of the new trees, especially because it feels foreign to take an entire tree without looking up; frequently a good spec boils down to a cookie cutter spec with 1-2 points in a different ability or two.

Then again, cookie cutters were always popular--even in vanilla. Cataclysm just streamlined them. All in all, this is an excellent post-mortem into why Blizzard changed talents and how they feel about it currently, even if the system has its detractors. It's also a good examination into mastery and early leveling as well as endgame goals.

You may have noticed we changed class talent trees for Cataclysm. We changed not just the trees themselves, as you might expect for an expansion, but the entire structure of the trees and the way you choose talents. Now that the Cataclysm model has been in play for several months, the team has been discussing what we like and don’t like about it, and I thought that might be of interest to some of you. As always with this series, this is design rumination, not a list of upcoming changes.

What Worked Well

The talent trees are simpler now, but without losing a lot of depth. Most of what we cut were passive talents that everyone took anyway, or really lame talents that did nothing.

Choosing your specialization at level 10 and not having to delay playing your character the way you want feels great. You can play your shaman as Elemental or Enhancement with the tools and bonuses to make either work.

Specs within a class feel different. This was a big challenge for the DPS warriors, warlocks, hunters, and rogues in particular. Nowadays those specs have different rotations, different strengths and utility, and a different flavor overall.

Mastery integrates into the trees well. We can delay the complexity until higher level, and we’re at the point now where it’s a competitive stat for many specs (though to be fair, not all yet).

There are some legitimate hard choices for many of the specs. Usually these come in two varieties: which talent you want before you can advance to the next tier of the tree, or where you want to spend those remaining talents after you’ve hit the bottom of the tree.

At the risk of catching flak for this statement, I feel that the game is as balanced as it’s ever been. When you look back at the vanilla or Burning Crusade days there were many specs that were just jokes and the difference between the highest performing and worst performing specs was on the order of 30-50% or more. Nowadays, players worry about 5-10% differences. Those are differences we still want to fix, absolutely, but we’ve come a long way. The talent trees have helped us do that.

What Didn’t Work

I’ll admit there are still a few clunker talents -- those that are undertuned or just not interesting enough. There aren’t many though, and they’re relatively easy to replace.

On the other hand, the talent trees still have traps for the unwary. For example, a Fury build that skips over Raging Blow is making a serious mistake. That may seem obvious to current players but it’s the kind of thing someone returning to the game after a hiatus might not understand immediately. (After all, you didn’t robotically take Ghostly Strike just because it was a gold medal ability.) While there is something to be said for safe choices, it would also be nice if the talents we expected players to have were talents they always had.

Some players miss true hybrid builds. (Hybrid in this context means spending near evenly in two trees -- I’m not talking about the more common use of “hybrid” as a tank or healing class.) To be fair, these builds were either not very competitive or were just cherry picking a few powerful talents in order to create something that was likely overpowered, especially in PvP. In other words, the reality of the hybrid build never lived up to the myth. But it’s fair to say that it’s impossible now to have a hybrid build, and we understand some players want them back.

I said above that there are tough choices within the trees of many specs, but there aren’t very many of them within each spec. Often it can come down to where to spend those last 1-3 talent points. While that was our goal, it would be even more exciting if there were more of those hard decisions. Hard decisions can be painful when you’re faced with excluding an ability or mechanic that’s fun to have. But overall we think hard, exclusive decisions are a good thing. They encourage experimentation and discussion and give players a chance to try out different things, all of which can help keep them engaged.

Even worse, one potential place to spend those points is in the first two tiers of the other trees of your class, yet those talents are extremely design-constrained. First, they have to be attractive to the main spec using that tree, so chances are you’re not going to find much interest in the healing tree if you’re a damage dealer (unless you want to improve your limited healing). Second, those top-tier talents can’t affect higher level abilities since the talents are available at level 10. Finally, because those talents are available early, they should really be relatively simple to understand for new or returning players. You don’t want to put complex procs with lots of exceptions and internal cooldowns that high in the tree. All of those reasons mean that it’s rare that there’s a true game-changing talent available in those first two tiers. This would be totally broken, but imagine you could spend those last 10 points anywhere in another tree. Much more exciting, huh?

This is a personal pet peeve, but I don’t like the talents that have a 33/66/100% chance to do what you want them to do. That’s just an awkward way of making a valuable talent cost more than one point. The new Cataclysm talent tree design didn’t cause this problem, but it didn’t fix it either.

The Future

This is the part where I’d really love to share our ideas for how we could address these problems, but some discussions are still a little too rough even for the dev watercooler. When we’re a little farther along, we’ll be able to share more. In the meantime, this is a great topic for further discussion. Players like to evaluate the talents in their particular class, but it’s also useful to evaluate the talent tree system as a whole. It’s an iconic design for World of Warcraft for sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He once spent a summer capturing live radioactive alligators. True story.

First Batch of BlizzCon Tickets

Also, as a quick reminder, BlizzCon tickets go on sale in less than 24 hours. Remember to get up prepared on Saturday!

Blizzard

Just in case May 21 isn't circled on your calendar, here's a quick reminder that BlizzCon 2011 tickets will be going on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. PT -- keep your eye on the ticket sales page tomorrow for the chance to get yours. If you are unable to purchase tickets tomorrow, a second batch will go on sale Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m. PT. In addition, tickets to an exclusive pre-BlizzCon dinner to benefit Children's Hospital of Orange County will go on sale Saturday, May 28 at 10 a.m. PT. For those unable to attend the show, in-depth coverage of BlizzCon will also be available through the BlizzCon Virtual Ticket, which is offered as a multi-channel Internet stream and also via DIRECTV in the United States.

BlizzCon 2011 will take place October 21 and 22 at the Anaheim Convention Center, and tickets cost $175 USD each. Tickets to the BlizzCon Benefit Dinner cost $500 USD each and include BlizzCon admission. For further information, check out the official BlizzCon site.

During the call, Blizzard Entertainment's CEO mentioned that subscriber levels had fallen down to 11.4 million this March from its former peak of 12 million. Initially, this seems staggering, but it's important to remember that subscriber levels do not decline linearly and tend to fluxuate. Furthermore, it actually makes quite a bit of sense given two factors: RIFT's launch in March and the absense of a major content patch at that point of time. The new and shiny feeling of Catalysm was disappearing by March and we've only just gotten a new patch a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, 4.1 was fairly light on content for a patch--luckily Firelands will be this summer and it looks much beefier, so it's likely a lot more people will resubscribe to check it out at that point.

In response to the declining subscriber levels, Blizzard has made some promises for WoW development speeds. They're currently looking for ways to make the process faster to reduce downtime in-between expansions. "As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content," Morhaime said.

For the most part, he's right. Content becomes much more accessible with each expansion in conjunction with players simply improving with experience. Personally, as a player who has raided since vanilla, it's hard to really throw me a curveball anymore--and that can lead to boredom and burnout when content is cleared and there's nothing left to do but repeat kills.

Of course, if you're getting bored with World of Warcraft, there's always Diablo III to get excited for. Today's call also shed some light on the much anticipated game and Morhaime hinted towards a public beta likely for Q3 2011. While it's hard to say if Diablo III will really make it out by the end of this year, development does seem to be picking up pace and Blizzard is trying hard to get it out before 2012.

So what do you think? Personally, I'm fairly unsurprised at this recent announcement, though their response of quicker expansions seem promising to me--as long as they don't become minor ones. Expansions should be monumental changes in Azeroth and storylines; I'd hate to see it head down a route where it loses quality and depth.

Patch 4.1 has only been live for a day, but 4.2 is being given some love right now from Blizzard. It looks like they're sticking to their promise of more frequent patches and content releases. They've just posted two preview videos of the upcoming content, including the new Firelands raid and Molten Front.

Warlock - : The friendly target of this ability now receives 1% (stacking 3 times to 3%) periodic spell damage and healing bonus instead of 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%). The casting Warlock still receives 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%).

Blizzard Entertainment

General

Honor is now purchasable from the Justice Commodities Vendor at 250 Honor per 375 Justice.

Justice is now purchasable from the Honor Commodities Vendor at 250 Justice per 375 Honor.

Conquest is now purchasable from the Valor vendor at 250 Conquest per 250 Valor.

Classes: General

Several persistent ground effects now display different visuals for hostile and friendly players. The following spells have the same visual effects for friendly players, but new alternate visuals for hostile players: Ring of Frost, Consecration, Desecration, Wild Mushroom, Flare, Ice Trap, Power Word: Barrier, Smoke Bomb, and Hand of Gul'dan. As a general rule, the alternate effects have a red tint or hue indicating they are created by an enemy player. There are currently some issues with this new change which are affecting several of these abilities and is not working as intended at this time.

: The friendly target of this ability now receives 1% (stacking 3 times to 3%) periodic spell damage and healing bonus instead of 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%). The casting Warlock still receives 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%).

Talent Specializations

Affliction

Unstable Affliction damage done when it is dispelled has been doubled, but this damage can no longer be critical.

Dungeons & Raids

Dungeon Finder

The Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms will now identify which class role is currently the least represented in the queue, and offer them additional rewards for entering the Dungeon Finder queue and completing a random level-85 Heroic dungeon.

The least represented class icon will show within the Dungeon Finder to indicate the role that is eligible to earn the bonus reward.

Players must queue solo with the currently indicated least represented class (by the system) and complete the dungeon up to and including the final boss in order to be eligible for the bonus reward.

The bonus reward will be displayed to eligible (system identified as least represented) classes within the UI.

Once the dungeon is completed the eligible player will receive a goodie bag with various potential rewards including: gold, rare gems, non-combat pets, and (very rare) mounts.

User Interface

Added a network category to the new Options screen and included the two network checkboxes.

The Network category contains the options "Optimize network for speed" and "Enable IPv6 when available".

Visual Settings Updates

Removed the red bar preventing the overall graphics slider from going to ultra based on computer specs.

When the user moves the overall slider to a setting that would have previously been prevented, any option that can't go as high as that setting will get the warning icon with a tooltip explaining why it can't go higher. For example: The user sets the overall slider to Ultra and the water setting can only go to Fair. The water setting would automatically switch to Fair.

Support for DirectX 11 can now be found in the Advanced tab of the Options screen.

At the login screen:

Moved the "Reset User Options" button from the popup window that appears when you click Options to the actual Options window.

Clicking Options now goes directly to the Video tab of the Options screen.

New Items

In addition, many of the other new items are quest items for the new fishing and cooking dailies players will be able to obtain in Darnassus, Ironforge, Thunder Bluff, and Undercity! I'll provide more details on those when I've got 'em. :)

We've also got some new items which you can check out after the break!

The patch right before Cataclysm reinvented the wheel. It made spirit a bread and butter stat for all healers, it introduced mastery, and it normalized almost everything. In his latest developer blog, Ghostcrawler talks about stat allocations. He also hates on Paladins for one paragraph.

Kidding--well, sort of. Maybe the Paladin hate isn't entirely uncalled for, either. We do have three specs and, as Ghostcrawler contends, that's a hard puzzle to solve. Blizzard doesn't like Intellect plate, but it doesn't like any other solution either. Give us Holy Paladins mail and we're just shaman. Make our spellpower derive from strength and we'll be Retribution Paladins that can heal extraordinarily well.

Ghostcrawler also breaks down loot tables, supply and demand, and how slot machine bosses like those from Baradin Hold and Vault of Archavon feel for both developers and players. It's an interesting read and a good insight on why things are the way they are and how the Cataclysm model is here to stay. After several expansions and six years, it looks like Blizzard feels like they've found the best solution. Read on to find out why.

The developers talk a lot about stat allocation on gear. We made some major changes to the stats that show up on armor and weapons for Cataclysm, and we periodically review how things have shaken out.

One suggestion that pops up fairly often, both internally and externally, is to make gear more tailored for each and every talent spec. (It honestly feels like we have 30 classes in the game at times.) We could have bosses drop Intellect mail with Hit on it for Elemental shaman. We could go back to legitimate bear gear. There might only be one spec (or less if you’re talking Feral’s two-specs-in-one-tree deal) interested in those drops.

The problem with that approach is that boss loot tables get really long. Say you're a Resto shaman who won some mail gloves last Tuesday. Had this alternative model been in place, those gloves might not have dropped for you. In this alternate universe, the Elemental gloves did instead. There is a reason that Argaloth and his ilk feel like slot machines -- because they can drop so many items, the chance of them dropping the piece you want is pretty low. That works for the Tol Barad boss because he’s pretty easy to reach and we want to encourage players to keep coming back to him week after week so that more players benefit from his gear. It might be pretty frustrating if every boss felt like Argaloth though.

There's another extreme we talk about sometimes, which is making gear more universal. We could merge the Spell Hit and Spirit stats pretty easily for all casters the way we did for Elemental, Balance, and Shadow. There would just be Intellect cloth that everyone from Destro to Disc would want. Great, you might think, less stuff will get sharded. But then think about how it would feel if you were one of those clothies. In a 10-player raid, there might be three people rolling on your loot. In a 25-player raid, it could be double that.

We could go even crazier. I mentioned in an earlier blog how Hit and Expertise aren’t very exciting to tanks, and that even if we made threat really hard to maintain, that tanks would probably still just stack survival stats and get frustrated when they lost aggro. Since we don’t vary the Stamina and Armor on tank gear (except in jewelry, socket bonuses, enchants, and gems perhaps), that means the tanking stats are really Dodge, Parry (except for druids), and Mastery. It wouldn’t be that hard to have say Haste convert to dodge chance and Crit convert to parry chance. Now the plate stats are Hit, Expertise, Crit, Haste, and Mastery (aside from the Strength and Stamina, which are always there in predictable proportions). Boom.

Now plate tanks share the same gear with plate DPS. When plate drops, all the death knights, warriors, and two of the three paladin specs might want it. Is that a better world? Less stuff would get wasted but there would also be more competition. You might feel less unique as an individual, and things might feel all too similar when you go from playing your Prot paladin to your Fury warrior, but on the upside, swapping to an alternate spec might be easier because you won’t need an entire second set of gear.

I mentioned two out of three paladin specs above. That third spec has been a thorn in our side for a long time. Paladins in general have a knack for that. I kid. (Mostly.) I'm talking about Intellect plate. We don't like Intellect plate, but we haven’t come up with a good alternative for it. The pitches we hear most often have downsides we don't like. Yes, a Holy paladin could wear mail… at which point their silhouette would look a lot like a shaman instead of a paladin. Yes, Holy paladins could derive their spell power from Strength… at which point they also hit with their weapons nearly as hard as Ret paladins. Yes, we could convert all that Strength to spell power, and convert the Hit to Spirit and the Expertise to Mastery or whatever. The Spirit to Hit conversion does the job, but it's not super elegant or intuitive. I’m not sure we want to pile more onto that design.

Unless we come up with a really compelling reason to change gear stats, we’ll probably stick with the Cataclysm model for the foreseeable future. But we’re interested in seeing your feedback. Would more universal gear be more fun or less fun? Do you like competing over items many folks want, like Deathbringer's Will or even Cho'gall's shoulder tokens? Does it suck when plate tanking gear drops long after the tanks have geared up, or is it nice to be able to toss it to the Ret or Fury player for their offspec? Do the druids wish they had real tanking gear? Are the Prot warriors jealous of the Feral gear model? Is this one of those places in the game that could benefit from a more simple design, even if it was a less fun design? There are no wrong answers here, only whiny ones. I kid. (Mostly.)

Greg "Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He tanks with a two-hander. On a shaman. Boom.

So what do you think about this post? Is Ghostcrawler on top of the game or is Cataclysm's normalization boring? Do you miss vanilla, TBC, or WotLK's stat allocations? Are your raids sharding loot still, even if that should be less of a problem now?